SJWs

Tales From The Safe Space, Part 41 – UCL Archaeology Students Triggered By ‘Scary Bones’

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

In tracking the spread of social justice/identity politics poison through the academic world, every day now seems to bring some new ridiculous example of petty intolerance or exaggerated student fragility. And each new story prompts the incredulous reaction that things can’t possibly get any more surreal, that we must surely have now reached Peak SJW. And then something even more ridiculous transpires on a Western university campus.

From the Daily Mail:

Students at UCL taking the archaeologies of modern conflict course have been told that they will encounter ‘historical events that may be disturbing, even traumatising’.

If they feel stressed, they can ‘step outside’ for the rest of the class ‘without penalty’, though they should catch up by copying the notes of another student.

Lecturer Gabriel Moshenska, who co-ordinates the UCL course on how archaeology can help unearth the truth about 20th and 21st century conflicts, said some students had been in the Armed Forces and may have suffered psychological trauma.

He admitted no one had ever complained that they found one of his talks upsetting and said the alert was ‘precautionary’.

What’s particularly concerning here is that the professor involved, Gabriel Moshenska, took the decision to add the precautionary trigger warning to his class entirely voluntarily, through his own initiative. There was no coercion to do so by angry students staging a sit-in outside his office, or through a coordinated social media campaign. Moschenska simply decided that people who had signed up to study the archaeology of modern conflict might need to be warned that they would encounter the remnants of conflict during the course of their studies.

What this shows us is that the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics, and its associated infantilising of students, has reached a critical mass whereby the culture of enforcing safe spaces, trigger warnings and treating grown adults like they are children takes place automatically without any further need for threats or campaigns. Professors and lecturers are capitulating to the student babies before anything is even demanded of them, either because they simply want an easy life and to avoid conflict, or because they actively support these efforts to infantilise young adults.

This is not a good development. If we thought it was bad when universities like Yale and Mizzou limply rolled over and capitulated when threatened by snarling, baby-faced SJWs with their protests and boycotts, that’s nothing compared to the further setbacks we may witness when faculty are active co-conspirators.

And this can lead nowhere good, as Brendan O’Neill laments The Spectator:

But of course there’s a major problem here: the relentless infantilisation of students, the treatment of them as overgrown children liable to be plunged by mere words or images into actual trauma (‘a disturbing experience which affects the mind or nerves of a person so as to induce hysteria or psychic conditions’: OED). The very idea of the university becomes impossible if students are presumed to be so mentally fragile that even class chatter could unhinge them psychically.

[..] This presumption of mental frailty among students, now seen as so psychically vulnerable that even F Scott Fitzgerald might traumatise them, is antithetical to the whole idea of university life, whose starting point must surely be that young adults are not only mentally competent but morally autonomous and intellectually curious. The overuse of the word ‘trauma’ to describe everything from an archaeology class to an old play shows how entrenched this view of students has become. As an American professor of psychology says, ‘When we describe misfortune, sadness or even pain as trauma… [we] turn every event into a catastrophe, leaving us helpless, broken and unable to move on’. In short, the more we tell young adults that everything is potentially traumatic, the more likely they are to experience everything as traumatic, or at least terrifying. We’re seriously teaching young people to see Shakespeare as potentially harmful to their mental health.

Strikingly, the UCL archaeology lecturer says that so far none of his students has accepted his offer to leave a ‘traumatic’ class discussion. That’s encouraging. It’s also revealing. It suggests the new campus craziness, the wild allergy to difficult debate and fear of offensive texts, doesn’t always come from students themselves. It’s been institutionalised, among actual academics, to such an extent that universities no longer instil in their students the Kantian idea that one should ‘Dare to know’ but rather tell them: ‘Sometimes it’s risky to know. What you find out might hurt you. So maybe you shouldn’t know that thing, or read that book, or listen to this lecture.’ The safety of ignorance.

Brendan O’Neill is more optimistic than I – he sees it as a positive thing that none of Nanny Moshenska’s students have yet chosen to avail themselves of their Right to Flee. And I suppose it is a good thing. But when professors provide even the option of leaving the classroom when confronted with learning material that arouses anything but positive emotions, they effectively legitimise the idea that words and ideas can cause actual physical harm, that being exposed to contrary viewpoints or shocking information is somehow dangerous, and that avoidance coping (staying away from things that upset you) actually works. In reality, there is no proof for any of these assertions, and many reasons to suspect that they are complete psychobabble hokum.

This year’s intake of Archaeologies of Modern Conflict students may be a hardy bunch (by the low standards we now set for young adults, meaning they won’t burst into tears and soil themselves at the sight of a human skull). But now that it is widely known that professors and Serious Adults consider it perfectly acceptable if students do have extreme reactions to academic material and need to flee the lecture hall, such behaviour is normalised and given the tacit approval of university authorities, making it much more likely that future students – believing it to be normal – will opt out of lectures which cause them emotional or intellectual discomfort.

In other words, academic freedom (and the reasonable expectation that students be treated like responsible adults) is now trapped in a pincer movement, with angry SJWs demanding to be infantilised on one side, and spineless collaborationist professors happy to oblige them on the other.

If there is an upside to all this, it can only be that with student populations and turncoat faculties now racing to outdo each other in their contempt for academic freedom and personal resilience, we will now reach our eventual rock bottom – wherever that may be – sooner than was previously the case.

Rejoice and be glad.

 

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Social Justice Is About Power And Control, But Not For The Benefit Of The Powerless

Samuel Hooper9 Comments

SJW white people dreadlocks social media

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What happens when a white Social Justice Warrior encounters a mixed race person who fails to hold the “correct” opinions about cultural appropriation?

If you still need convincing that the “social justice” movement is in fact nothing to do with justice or equality and everything to do with wielding power over other people to control what they think, say and do, then let this picture be your guide.

Here we have a comment posted by a young Social Justice Warrior – an online activist who spends their time trying to police the public discourse and censor others – on the tumblr social network, in which the user Party Island (pronouns: they/them) confesses a dilemma.

You see, Party Island is very much against the phenomenon known as “cultural appropriation”, that timeless phenomenon where cultures, customs and fashions spread across different national or ethnic groups. While some Bad People might think that cultural appropriation is a good thing, responsible for everything from the pop music we hear to the fusion cuisines we eat, in fact cultural appropriation is a terrible tool of oppression in which arrogant white people claim credit for the cultural innovations of other marginalised groups, either for personal or commercial gain. Or so say the SJWs.

And Party Island was posting on the evils of white people wearing their hair in dreadlocks (a particularly contentious issue in the SJW community) when one of his mixed-race friends dared to utter the now-blasphemous assertion that people of any race or background should be able to wear their hair any way they damn well please, and that Party Island was massively overreacting.

As the complaint reads:

I’m at a loss. I posted about white people & black hair on Facebook and my old roommate, who is mixed race but white passing, is telling ME I’m overreacting and that “people should wear their hair how they want.” I don’t know how to approach this. I don’t want to talk over her because even if she’s white passing, she holds more authority over me in race related issues. I don’t know what to do.

The friend’s statement that “people should wear their hair how they want” is shocking to the ears of Party Island, who is used to playing the role of white saviour to the “oppressed” black masses by being a jumped-up, self-righteous little internet censor, persecuting anyone who fails to use the latest up-to-the-minute politically correct terminology and customs.

Now Party Island has been told to lay off, not by a fellow white person – their peer at the bottom of the inverted hierarchy of privilege – but by someone who is mixed race, and therefore occupying a more senior position in the pyramid. In Social Justice World, you see, power and legitimacy to speak on any issue derives from one’s place in the pyramid. On feminist issues, for example, being a woman (or any guy with a penis who decides to identify as a woman) gives one a certain right to speak about feminist issues, but being a black, disabled woman means you occupy an even higher position in the inverted pyramid and that your words, therefore, count for much more.

If a white person had told Party Island that they were overreacting by getting upset at other white people who “appropriate black culture” by wearing their hair in dreadlocks, Party Island could demand that they “check their privilege”, insist that they were being oppressive and send them off to educate themselves on issues of racial justice and cultural appropriation. But the friend is not white, they are mixed race. And this presents Party Island with a dilemma.

On the one hand, there is the strong instinct to “punish” the friend’s blasphemous statement that white people should be allowed to wear dreadlocks, because this is how these parasitical people gain power and influence over our discourse, culture and society in the first place – by meting out public shamings and other punishments to heretics in order to advance their own ideology. But on the other hand, Party Island knows that as a white person in the presence of a mixed race person (though “white passing”, they tell us, as mitigating evidence) their duty is to bow obsequiously and defer to whatever the mixed race person happens to say on the subject of race.

This creates an unresolvable logical error in the SJW brain of Party Island. They want to be a good foot soldier in the Social Justice Army and “re-educate” this blasphemer, but the blasphemer is of superior rank in the social justice hierarchy. It’s a bit like a zealous, well-trained infantry private discovering his captain breaking the army code of conduct. The desire to call out the crime and administer “punishment” is overwhelming, but the captain’s rank causes hesitancy and a failure of courage.

So what does Party Island do? Unable to confront their mixed race friend directly about their Evil Thoughtcrime and insufficient anger at the cultural appropriation of dreadlocks, this SJW flags his problem to the wider community in the hope that it will be seen by other properly-educated SJWs who occupy equal or greater rank in the hierarchy of victimhood, and who therefore have the power and legitimacy to correct this erroneous mixed race person. Ideally, in this warped world, a “black passing” black person who is also a transexual, disabled rape survivor will come passing by, notice the exchange and unload on Party Island’s poor mixed race friend with the full weight of their exalted position in the pyramid.

If all of this seems ludicrous and a million miles away from doing anything which might conceivably affect or help actual black people in America, you would be right. Because at its dark, festering core the Social Justice movement is not about delivering justice, equality or doing any other kind of social good. Social wrongs are merely the fuel which power the machine to perform its true purpose – controlling the language and the thinking of society in order to establish beady-eyed little zealots like Party Island as the indispensable clerisy who tell everyone else what to say and do.

Social Justice is, above everything else, about the acquisition and exercising of power. Victimhood is actively sought and eagerly weaponised by members of this Social Justice clerisy in their scramble for status amongst their peers and contemporaries. The legitimate problems and grievances of minority communities become irritating background noise, a distraction from what really matters – this finickity, juvenile, university campus parlour game in which casting oneself as the most vulnerable, oppressed but simultaneously tolerant person imaginable confers tremendous power, while the slightest slip (such as accidentally using the wrong word) can lead to immediate excommunication from the group.

That’s what is going on here.

That’s what “social justice” is really all about.

 

Bonita Tindle - Assault White Student for Cultural Appropriation - Identity Politics

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 29 – The Surreal NUS Annual Conference

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

NUS annual conference

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Down with the National Union of Students

We know that they are highly averse to clapping and that many of their affiliate university students’ unions have been entirely conquered by the Cult of Identity Politics, but what is life really like at the NUS annual conference?

Jack Grove has been into the lion’s den (or should that be sheep’s pen?), and reports in the Times Higher Education:

On arrival at the registration desk at the Brighton Centre, I was able to choose from a range of stickers that would indicate to delegates if I’d prefer to be addressed along the lines of “he/him/his” or perhaps “they/them/theirs”. Later in the day, delegates elected a full-time sabbatical officer to deal with trans issues – a major financial commitment for a union that can’t afford a paid post dedicated to postgraduate issues.

When Ms Bouattia was elected as president – the union’s first female black Muslim leader – her supporters were chided by the panel chair for clapping and cheering as this may cause distress to other delegates and trigger a trauma episode.

Instead, delegates were asked by a sincere delegate not to whoop or holler, or clap at all, but use “jazz hands” to show appreciation (people were asked to wiggle their fingers) as the noise created was “ableist” and had indeed caused the delegate in question to have a panic attack on previous occasions.

While Spiked’s Tom Slater reports:

The National Union of Students conference is over. But we’ll still have the memories – the jazz hands, the whingeing and the casual anti-Semitism. For this was the year when this tyranny of crybabies, this politburo of plonkers, truly outdid itself. Not only did delegates call for social-media apps to be banned (people are saying nasty things on them) and for Holocaust Memorial Day to be scrapped (apparently it’s not ‘inclusive’) — they also elected as the new NUS president Malia Bouattia, someone who thinks condemning ISIS might ‘send the wrong message’ and is wont to wax lyrical about the ‘Zionist-led media’.

This year’s shitshow has led to students around the country calling for their unions to disaffiliate from the NUS. About time. The NUS is a censorious, anti-democratic husk, propped up by right-on middle-class cliques. Though it claims to fight for students’ rights, it doesn’t have much truck with their right to speak freely, their right to conduct their sexual lives as they see fit, or even their right to party. In 2013, the NUS signed up to minimum pricing: this is a students’ union that thinks beer is too cheap.

It’s time to smash the NUS and start anew. Students need a union that truly looks out for them, that allows them to make common cause on the issues that matter. But, above all, they need a union that treats them as morally autonomous adults, that takes them seriously, that believes students can change the world rather than just be triggered by it.

I cannot emphasise enough that this is no longer a niche phenomenon. This is not a few isolated incidents, or a few overenthusiastic students on a few of the more liberal university campuses. This is not only nationwide, but also transatlantic.  And it is here to stay.

Here is a National Union of Students whose theoretical purpose is to represent the academic and pastoral interests of all students in the country, but which feels the need to lavish resources on a full-time Trans Issues officer at a time when they do not even have a paid officer to represent the different needs of postgraduate students. In other words, here is a union which has left behind any pretence of doing what a union should do, and instead devoted itself wholly to the furtherance of the identity politics agenda.

We would never witness this dereliction of duty in pursuit of secondary objectives in any other trade union, even (or especially) the most militant and prone to industrial action. The RMT union – and one has to hand it to them – seeks to grind out the best financial settlement possible for its members, and uses strikes or even just the threat of strikes to paralyse London, bring an elected Conservative mayor to his knees, and win key concessions for already well-paid tube drivers on the London Underground.

You would never see the RMT being half-hearted in its negotiations with Transport for London because its leadership was too distracted instituting a new Safe Space policy or agitating for mandatory social justice re-education courses for workers. They focus, with undeniable effectiveness, on fulfilling their primary duty to their members – namely, achieving the best possible employer settlements on wages and conditions.

And this is the key point. The National Union of Students not only no longer represents the majority of university students, it now pursues aims and objectives which are irrelevant to many of them and are even sometimes directly antagonistic toward them (particularly in the case of conservatives, small-L liberals or assorted others who simply value free speech). They no longer even claim to act for all students. They act primarily for those students bound up in the social justice movement.

It is now ten years since I graduated, and during my time at Cambridge and Warwick universities the NUS was never anything more than an annoyingly persistent leftist buzzing in my ear. Sure, it was stupid when the Warwick Students’ Union wasted time debating a motion to express their objection to George W. Bush making a state visit to Britain, but they did not actively go out of their way to interfere in my life. This is no longer the case. Now, the Warwick Students’ Union is rated Red in the annual Spiked university free speech rankings, and actively seeks to control what every student in campus is allowed to read, buy, think, hear or say.

In other words, a lot has changed in a decade. In just the last few years in particular, identity politics cultists and assorted Social Justice Warriors have made an unprecedented power play within students union, against university administrators and against any of their peers who do not subscribe to their own worldview. Those who graduated a decade or more ago and do not pay close attention to what is happening in our universities may well see this as alarmism at first glance – “surely things can’t be that ridiculous?” goes the common refrain.

But they are. And it is going to get worse. We are already at a point where holding conservative views on campus attracts outright ridicule and hostility. In a few more years, this opprobrium will spread to those who merely fail to sing from the social justice hymn sheet loudly and sincerely enough. And to date there has been almost zero fightback from the supposed adults in the room, the university faculties and administrators. Liberty-loving students have been left to face the onslaught alone.

Now, nobody can predict exactly what will be the consequence of a growing number of identity politics-infected young people graduating and joining the labour market and becoming involved in party political activism. Some will doubtless be jolted to their senses by their collision with reality, and come to look back in shame on their illiberal student ways. But many others will survive the impact, and when they regroup they will begin to look for ways to recreate their university Safe Space environment here among us. It has already begun.

So calling attention to the identity politics/social justice takeover of universities is not a fringe interest or a massive overreaction. This new focus by writers – including this blog’s own “Tales From The Safe Space” series – provides an unsettling preview of what life will be like in another decade, unless those who object to this therapeutic, victimhood culture begin to get organised and fight back.

But if you are happy for your future workplace to gradually turn into a never-ending NUS conference, then by all means continue burying your head in the sand.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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Top Image: Lancaster University Students’ Union

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 28 – When Both Sides Use SJW Tactics

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Safe Space University

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If unchecked, identity politics and Social Justice Warrior tactics will lead to a stalemate on university campuses where everything is offensive, everyone is offended and both protest and counter-protest become impossible

Recently, this blog speculated as to what would happen if and when conservatives on university campuses finally get sick of being shouted down and censored on campus by social justice activists using the tactics of identity politics, and begin to adopt the same kind of arguments and tactics themselves as a kind of self-defence mechanism.

As I concluded at the time:

Nobody likes a pity party, but that is exactly what will get if conservative and liberal students face off against each other not as they should, through lively debate, but rather through constant, tear-stained appeals for the university authorities to intercede on behalf of their respective sides.

And in a sense, one cannot blame [conservative students] for behaving in this way. They have watched for months and years while identity politics-wielding left-wing students get every little thing that they demand from spineless university administrations, and shame into submission anybody who stands in their way.

It is not therefore an illogical leap when other students conclude that this is the best and most effective way of advancing one’s own agenda. If the Social Justice Warriors can mobilise support and win concessions by emphasising (and frankly, grossly exaggerating) their supposed victimhood and oppression, why should conservatives not do the same?

[..] But in the longer term, if through repeated practice young students become adept at flaunting their fragility and exalting in their helplessness, both sides will fight to a bloody draw, with nobody able to say or do anything on campus without immediately triggering a protest and counter-protest. University will truly no longer be a place for the discussion of ideas, but a sheltered place of “comfort and home” for weak-minded adult babies, an intellectual demilitarised zone protected by a field of verbal landmines laid by every competing minority group over the academic and political discourse.

And an “intellectual demilitarised zone” is exactly what we are now just beginning to see, with those people and groups who were traditionally the target of social justice warrior tactics now adopting the same language of victimhood and fragility in an attempt to deflect criticism of themselves and shame their accusers into dialling back their criticism.

The context in this case is that of UC Davis and the ongoing protests on that campus to force the resignation of their Chancellor, Linda Katehi. Much of the criticism of Katehi is actually justified in this case – she came to prominence for presiding over an infamous incident in 2011 where Occupy protesters were pepper sprayed by campus police, and subsequent efforts to scrub the internet of mentions of the event in the name of “online reputation management. Some of her failings are detailed in this local press report.

But the rights and wrongs of Katehi’s actions are irrelevant for the purposes of our analysis. What is if interest here is the fact that Katehi’s defenders among the university student population, faculty and administrators are now using the same language of beleaguered and bullied “victims” in an attempt to win public sympathy as well as respite from their accusers.

Jonathan Haidt comments on this phenomenon at The Atlantic:

At UC Davis, where student activists still hope to oust Chancellor Linda Katehi, critics of their activism are using concepts like “safe space” and “hostile climate” to attack it.

The student activists had occupied a small room outside Katehi’s office, planning to stay until their chancellor resigned or was removed from her post. By the time they left 36 days later, a petition that now bears roughly 100 signatures of UC Davis students and staff were demanding that they prematurely end their occupation, criticizing their tactics, and alleging a number of grave transgressions: The signatories accused the student activists of sexism, racism, bullying, abuse, and harassment, complaining that many who used the administration building “no longer feel safe.” The student activists say that those charges are unfair.

While regarding a different protest at Ohio State University, Conor Friedersdorf notes that this is not the only time that targets of a student protest have used the language and tactics of social justice warriors to plead vulnerability and seek to escape from criticism or protest:

Insofar as campus concepts like safe spaces, microaggressions, and claims of trauma over minor altercations spread from activist culture to campus culture, the powerful will inevitably make use of them. Where sensitivity to harm and subjective discomfort are king, and denying someone “a safe space” is verboten, folks standing in groups, confrontationally shouting out demands, will not fare well. When convenient, administrators will declare them scary and unfit for the safe space, exploiting how verboten it is to challenge anyone who says they feel afraid.

In cases like this one, it won’t matter that one of the least scary experiences in the world is walking into a university administration building at 7 a.m., well-rested and ready for work, to be greeted by a bunch of exhausted 18-year-old OSU students groggily looking up from the corner where they curled up with college hoodies as pillows. After years of reporting on occupations like this one, I’ve never heard of even one case of a college staff member of administrator coming away with even a scratch. Yet in the name of preserving “safe space,” these protesters were evicted.

This emergence of competitive grievance culture is only going to grow. Only last month, this blog remarked that competition between different identity groups all using the same anti free speech tactics is currently less marked on American university campuses compared to British institutions, but already it seems that the United States has caught up.

This is what our new victimhood culture has wrought. Expect to see this same scenario repeated again and again in the coming months, as those people who are traditionally the target of leftist campus activism – conservatives, university administrators and others – realise that they can “appropriate” the language and tactics of the SJWs to portray themselves as the real victims and get themselves off the hook.

As yet, the SJWs have no response to this tactic. As we have recently seen, many students indoctrinated into the Cult of Identity Politics are so terrified of putting a foot wrong themselves by saying or doing something “offensive” that their first reaction when confronted with any identity politics claim is to freeze like a deer in the headlights and then automatically accept it as valid.

According to this mindset, if a university administrator – heck, even a university Chancellor – claims that student protests and disagreement are making them feel unsafe, then it is the duty of the identity politics adherent to withdraw in deference to the fragility of the supposed victim. Thus any debate or protest, regardless of the participants, can now potentially be shut down simply by uttering the three words “I feel unsafe”.

As Jonathan Haidt notes, by using these illiberal tactics so freely and excessively, student activists have effectively created the weapon with which campus authorities may now attempt to silence them:

The civil-rights movement, the free-speech movement, the anti-Vietnam protests, and protesters on both sides of the gun and abortion questions have all deliberately tried to make others uncomfortable, intellectually if not physically. They’ve all shouted, insulted, provoked, and tried to deny their opponents “safe spaces.”

Today’s strain of campus progressivism has a more ambiguous relationship with traditional liberal values, finding them too viewpoint neutral and rough-and-tumble.

Still, most campus protests are left-leaning. And administrators cannot help but realize that almost all of that activism is, on some level, about confrontation—that it frequently involves a lot of shouting or chanting or marching or banging on drums. Now, any time such protests challenge the interests of the administration, or make their jobs marginally harder or their lives marginally more inconvenient, they can always pinpoint some folks who are earnestly upset or unnerved by all the ruckus.

They can always undermine the activists of the moment by finding the students experiencing “trauma” from all the conflict; the staff members who feel “unsafe” around protesters, the community member who, in the new paradigm, somehow feel “silenced.”

As best I can tell, this does not worry leftist activists yet, perhaps because they mostly operate on shorter time-horizons than other campus power brokers, or perhaps because they see themselves as marginalized and mistakenly believe these standards will never be applied to them, even though it’s already happening.

Haidt concludes his own analysis:

In the end, unreformed social justice activism may destroy itself.

One gets the slight impression that Haidt, despite his sterling work drawing attention to the growing illiberalism within universities, sees this as something at least partially regrettable.

This blog would regard the collapse of social justice activism under the weight of its own sanctimony – at least for as long as it is so closely intertwined with poisonous identity politics – as a great and unexpected triumph. But a prolonged stalemate with both sides using identity politics tactics to shame the other and parade their supposed victimhood in front of authorities and the observing public – with free speech rights being continuously eroded at both ends – still seems like the more likely outcome, at least in the medium term.

In short, our new victimhood culture is not going anywhere in a hurry. Therefore, those who oppose it must find other means of fighting back besides the counter-productive instinct to play the social justice warriors at their own game.

 

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White Privilege Conference: Social Justice Warriors Can Never Be Placated

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

WPC2016 twitter anger

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Social Justice Warriors do not want to end oppression. They merely want to become the oppressors themselves

If any further proof were needed that Social Justice Warriors can never be appeased or placated – and that they will keep on moving the goalposts indefinitely so that people with “privilege” can only ever fail the moral tests set for them – then one needs to look no further than the seventeenth annual White Privilege Conference which just concluded in Philadelphia.

One might have thought that an annual confab of contrite white people and their Allies in Privilege to self-flagellate and ruminate on the many ways in which they structurally oppress minorities would have been met with some approval by the SJW brigade. If anything could possibly please the Social Justice Warriors, it should be this event.

And so naturally, the SJWs crawl all over the conference and pick through every speech and interpersonal interaction to find fault with it, to wail and clutch their pearls in shock at the terrible oppression and insensitivity taking place, and to generally flaunt their More Moral Than Thou credentials in public.

The Daily Caller reports:

Disaffected participants in the 2016 White Privilege Conference (WPC) have taken to Twitter to complain that the conference was, ironically, too white and was actually filled to the brim with white supremacy.

Adopting the hashtag #WPCSoWhite, inspired by the recent #OscarsSoWhite campaign, Twitter users claimed the conference that was supposed to battle white privilege instead served to entrench it.

The tag appears to have been started and pushed with particular vigor by Aeriel Ashlee, an education consultant who attended WPC and objected to several parts of a keynote address delivered by (white) historian James Loewen.

She said Loewen’s rhetoric, which was solidly progressive throughout, actually entrenched white supremacy, partly because his speech allegedly lasted too long. When Loewen attempted to defend himself, Ashlee said that any defense was invalid and only further showed his white supremacy.

Every act by non-SJWs, even those desperately designed to appease them and lessen their anger (like university administrators resigning for upsetting their crybaby student populations or whole conferences being set up to discuss the problem with white people) is only more evidence of their guilt. Non-SJWs literally can do no right in the eyes of these totalitarian complainers.

This Twitter exchange between one of the keynote speakers and an antagonist shows the futility of debate, or even of complete capitulation to their demands:

James Loewen - Aeriel Ashlee - Twitter exchange

What exactly was Loewen supposed to do after being accused of overrunning his speaking time when in reality he did no such thing? According to SJW logic, the only appropriate response would have been for Loewen to fall on his knees and beg for forgiveness, even though he had done nothing wrong. And when Loewen failed to do so, the mere act of correcting Ashlee’s false accusation was interpreted as “a white man’s defensiveness intead of accepting responsibility”.

This is madness. In this universe, factual errors and misunderstandings can no longer be corrected if it involves a white male attempting to defend himself or contradicting a POC (person of colour) or other identity group, whose judgement is always final when it comes to determining whether any word or act constitutes “oppression”.

As Rod Dreher commented when social justice warriors criticised a classical music scholar for having the temerity to spend his free time teaching a class about “opera and ideas” to prison inmates:

SJWs ruin everything. They kill everything they touch. Why would anyone want to work in a field where these nuts run rampant?

There is literally no good deed or benign intention which modern Identity Politics cultists will not pick through, determined to find fault. But more tragically for these SJWs, this mindset dooms them to be prisoners of their own (real or perceived) circumstances, passing up endless opportunities for personal growth and even material advancement because they are so self-obsessed and captivated by the injustices meted out on past generations decades and even centuries ago.

More to the point, in the shorter term they will quickly become friendless. Except within their hermetically sealed circle of fellow Identity Politics cultists, nobody will want to socialise or work with these people. Because who wants to be in the company of highly-strung perpetual victims who consider themselves so morally superior that they police the words and behaviour of everyone around them?

But maybe that is where this will end up – with Identity Politics cultists sequestering themselves away in a closed, parallel society, unwilling to engage with the real world lest it corrupt or “harm” them. Perhaps SJWs will be the monks of the twenty-first century, worshipping their narcissistic god of self-identity and living unbearably tense lives as they seek to purge any oppressive behaviour from their systems and excommunicate those who make the smallest transgressions.

Far better than the rest of us having to submit to their tyranny.

 

The White Privilege Conference

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